I started reading and writing poetry as a teenager. Growing up in Southern California with few friends or a sense of community, I found solace in the power of the written word. I have since found community with my fellow writers, and I am grateful to remain involved. Recent work of mine has appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, BIG HAMMER and San Pedro River Review, among other journals that have been very generous and supportive of my growth as a poet and writer.

Crayons for Dessert

​​John commands everyone's attention when he sings a Smokey Robinson tune,a long strand of drool hangingfrom his outstretched, quiveringbottom lip that our mental health counselor wipes off with thetorn first page of a brochure on sexually transmitted diseases, just as a dazed Haitian man who brought a Boys II Men album to our post-lunchtime creative expressions group forms a gun with his hand and pretends to shoot himself,which ignites a giggle fit in the schizophrenic waiting roombingo champion next to me that sounds like a hundred Pillsbury Doughboys trappedinside of a blender. Thehypnotic leather jowls of an old, washed up beauty queen graze the cardboard ruins of a cup of noodle soup box that she vandalizes with her chicken scratch notes of our biweekly meetings in a crayonthe color of an artificial Velveeta sunrise thatshe slowly begins to munch on, our counselor oblivious as she whispers into the electric razor buzz shock of her newest cell phone, aggravating the side effects of ourmedications, our mouths opened wide so they could be sure we didn't cheek our pills.

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